Saturday, 14 July 2012

All day long, as I look from the 14th
floor window of my new office in midtown Manhattan,
a hypnotic scene plays out in the streets below. As one set of traffic lights
turns green, vehicles – sometimes swarmed four or five deep across the street –
resume their journey, like so many multi-coloured woodlice, north up sixth avenue
towards Central Park. Then the lights change
and two ant-like swarms of pedestrians march out from either side of Sixth Avenue and
merge in the middle. One swarm of woodlouse-cars meanwhile makes its way west
along 51st street
and a second heads east along 50th. Then, at a regular tempo, the pattern
starts again, changing only when some oddity comes along. I watched one day as
a food vendor pushing his cart across the intersection was marooned mid-crossing
by a change of lights. Cars nudged up against the unexpected obstruction and
pedestrians marched round it, like water finding its way around a rock newly
fallen into a stream.

Then, every now and again, between the woodlice
and the ants appears a gnat – a bicycle picking its way around the parked cars
and zig-zagging between the pedestrians. Both the pedestrian-ants and the
woodlouse-cars seem impatient with them. It is, after all, especially clear
from my vantage point that the bicycles – dodging out behind stopped cars,
darting between the ranks of cars stopped at lights – travel in very different
lines from the straight up-and-down or across-town of most other Manhattan traffic. Every
now and again, some sudden lurch by a taxi or truck has me fearing I’ll need to
run to the elevator, head down to the street and act as a witness on some prone
cyclist’s behalf.

West 15th Street: Orderly, but not in a very human way

The view from my window has sprinkled yeast
on an idea that’s been fermenting in my mind all the three weeks I’ve so far
been cycling around New York.
It’s that the shape of a city’s infrastructure does more than anything else to
forge the culture of its roads. New
York’s infrastructure, moreover, seeks a lot of the
time to force human beings into the neat patterns that sprang from the minds of
its 19th century planners. It was a bold idea, a refreshing change
from the haphazard patterns of a city like London, whose street plan in parts dates back as far as Roman times. But it’s hardly suprising that the less-than-straight lines of
most humans’ attitudes and behaviour sometimes lead them to burst out of the
grid’s constraints.

When I tell people I’m cycling in New York,
it conjures up a mental picture for most of my pedalling down some vast
Manhattan avenue, skyscrapers towering over me and threatening streams of cars,
trucks and buses roaring past. In fact, most of my Manhattan cycling has involved my making my
way to the car-free Hudson River Greenway, cycling to the appropriate cross
street then cutting across the island to my destination. A brief ride this week
was a rare exception. Keen to pick up a train ticket quickly from Pennsylvania station, I
headed down Broadway, through Times Square and on down 7th Avenue.

I was suddenly after leaving the Broadway
bike lane one of the gnats I could see from my office window, navigating along
the line of parked cars to the side of four roaring streams of traffic. At
cross streets where the lights were in my favour, I would still frequently face
obstruction from a turning car, trying to nose its way through the cross-street
pedestrians but stuck in my path. I had to maneouvre out round each, trusting
that I wouldn’t find myself, if one of the vehicles made a sudden change of
course, heading for a collision.

The 7th avenue experience was
almost wholly a product of the city’s decisions about how to use its space.
Seventh Avenue could have been a perfectly adequate – and probably far less
intimidating – two-way street, with traffic forced into the relatively narrow
confines of most London
thoroughfares. Cars would then have been far less inclined to swing wildly
across the lanes, ignoring general traffic law and the speed limit. Someone preferred,
many years ago, to prioritise the swift passage of cars on the avenues over
making them feel more human-scale. It created vast tarmac tracts that, when
empty, must feel to a driver like some huge auto playground.

The West Side highway, with the Hudson River Greenway:
a chance to watch nearly every road user type breaking rules.

I face a different set of challenges using
the Hudson River Greenway. The Greenway may, as I’ve noted before, be the
finest piece of cycling infrastructure in the English-speaking world. It’s
spacious, largely unaffected by traffic and offers fine vistas across the river
to New Jersey.
It even afforded me, one recent morning, the chance to race a ship. The general
cargo vessel was heading up the Hudson at, I think, a speed of around 15 knots
– more or less the perfect pacer for a cyclist heading into the wind on an old
hybrid. I was able to catch up at points but held back now and again by traffic
lights.

Yet, despite the numerous signs telling
them to follow their own path, the cycle track is thick with runners, often
pushing strollers (baby buggies, for British readers). Overtaking them safely
requires a swing into the opposite lane, often into the face of an oncoming
cyclist intent on maintaining the appropriate tempo for his triathlon training.
The Greenway is also, while less stop-and-start than a Manhattan Avenue, dotted with traffic
lights, protecting turnings across the path into the police department’s pound
for towed vehicles, the city’s cruise terminal, the 30th street heliport and
others. A number of these lights spend
much of their time showing red for cyclists and green for cars, even though motor vehicles are rare. The pattern at the cruise terminal remains unchanged,
for example, whether a ship is disembarking or the terminal’s gates are locked.
Even a cyclist as rules-obsessed as I finds it impossible to stop at these
junctions, sticking pointlessly to the letter of the law while around motorists
zip at 50mph down the 35mph westside highway, cyclists buzz pedestrians and
runners jog, talking on their iPhones, down a path meant only for cyclists and
skaters.

The traditional response to all these
different forms of chaos is to bemoan road users’ failure to obey the rules.
The still-more traditional response is to berate cyclists as if they were the
only ones breaking them. There is obviously some merit in wishing road users
were generally more careful of others’ needs. I was certainly embarrassed on
behalf of cyclists generally when, one Sunday morning, I watched a string of
speeding cyclists yell out of the way cruise passengers trying entirely
legitimately to use a crossing on the Greenway.

But it’s more interesting, I think, to
examine why New York’s traffic system seems to
encourage possibly even more widespread rule-flouting than London’s more chaotic sprawl.

Police horses on Sixth Avenue:
not every animal in the traffic is metaphorical

The answer, I’d suggest, lies in the
similarities between renting a New
York apartment and riding in the city. Both exhibit America’s
tendency to make every rule clear and unambiguous – for the avoidance of doubt,
as a very American phrase puts it. Large British corporations may, I suspect,
have been bought and sold with less paperwork than was required for me to rent
a Brooklyn loft for my family. Everything from
whether the building had ever had a bed bug infestation to whether we needed
guards on the windows to protect the children was carefully and methodically
spelt out. On the roads, a far higher proportion of intersections in New York are traffic light controlled than in London. There’s far less
reliance than in London on allowing road users’ good sense and public spirit
work out the best traffic flows at less busy junctions.

That stems in part from an admirable
instinct. The United States,
a country founded by dissidents and populated by immigrants, recognises that
not everyone implicitly shares the same approach to problems. It codifies nearly
everything. That has many undoubted strengths over the British assumption that
good chaps will have the common sense to understand how things should be done.
One country has a hallowed constitution whose workings are overseen by nine
learned justices. The other has never even written its constitution down. The
American principle, as laid down by John Adams, the second president, is “the
rule of laws, not the rule of men”.

Yet there’s a risk, as with any regulation,
that it becomes like the Russian tax system – so onerous that, because no-one
can fully follow it, it hands arbitrary power to the rule-enforcers. With the
apartment, the bureaucratic problems seemed insurmountable until I threatened
to take my business elsewhere and the formalities concluded suspiciously
speedily. As a cyclist, it is surprisingly difficult heading along a Manhattan avenue not at
least to rush through traffic lights as they’re changing. The blocks’ shape –
shorter north-south than they are east-west – and the lights’ timing to suit
motor vehicle, rather than cyclist, speed mean one can face a red light close
to every 100 yards. With the short time pedestrians have to cross, it’s small
wonder so many start crossing streets with lights on red, neglecting to look
out for cyclists following behind the mass of traffic. The police effectively
have free rein to issue violation notices to pretty much any road user they
choose – and cyclists, who are far less likely to cause fatalities than
motorists, are often the target.

Greeley Square, in midtown: tailored to motorists' speed,
rather than cyclists' comfort

Even more corrosively, the burden of rules
can send a message to road users to abandon judgement and good sense. The red lights
protecting roads on the Greenway seem to me a subtle message that the rules are
arbitrary and weighted against cyclists. While it’s unfortunate, it’s small wonder that so many then go on to ignore the rules designed to protect
pedestrians at crossings.

None of this is to say that New York doesn’t work
for cyclists. I’ve encountered, I think, less straightforward aggression from
motorists than in London.
With the competition for road space less frantic, fewer drivers seem to feel
quite as embattled as the worst in London.
I’ve had no-one deliberately try to intimidate me with his or her driving yet –
a fairly regular occurrence in London.
Many of the cycle facilities are excellent.

But I can’t help thinking a slight change
in New York’s
approach might produce some surprising results. A few less traffic lights and I
would certainly be looking down from my window at a less metronomically regular
scene. I might even be observing one where the woodlice and gnats were willing
to let the ants cross - and the woodlice less prone to cutting across the
zig-zagging gnats’ paths.

About Me

I'm a hefty, 6ft 5in Scot. I moved back to London in 2016 after four years of living and cycling in New York City. Despite my size, I have a nearly infallible method of making myself invisible. I put on an eye-catching helmet, pull on a high visibility jacket, reflective wristbands and trouser straps, get on a light blue touring bicycle and head off down the road. I'm suddenly so hard to see that two drivers have knocked me off because, they said, they didn't see me.
This blog is an effort to explain to some of the impatient motorists stuck behind me, puzzled friends and colleagues and - perhaps most of all myself - why being a cyclist has become almost as important a part of my identity as far more important things - my role as a husband, father, Christian and journalist. It seeks to do so by applying the principles of moral philosophy - which I studied for a year at university - and other intellectual disciplines to how I behave on my bike and how everyone uses roads.